Edgar Allan Poe essentially invented the detective story in 1841 with Murders in the Rue Morgue. In the years that followed, however, detective fiction in America saw no significant progress as a literary genre. Much to the dismay of moral crusaders like Anthony Comstock, dime novels and other sensationalist publications satisfied the public's hunger for a yarn. Things changed as the century waned, and eventually the detective was reborn as a figure of American literature. In part these changes were due to a combination of social conditions, including the rise and decline of the police as an institution; the parallel development of private detectives; the birth of the crusading newspaper reporter; and the beginnings of forensic science. Influential, too, was the new role model offered by a wildly popular British import named Sherlock Holmes. Focusing on the late 19th century and early 20th, this volume covers the formative years of American detective fiction. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

From the Roaring Twenties to the 1970s detectives reigned supreme in police departments across the country. In this tightly woven slice of true crime reportage, Thomas A. Reppetto offers a behind-the-scenes look into some of the most notable investigations to occur during the golden age of the detective in American criminal justice. From William Burns, who during his heyday was known as America’s Sherlock Holmes, to Thad Brown, who probed the notorious Black Dahlia murder in Los Angeles, to Elliott Ness, who cleaned up the Cleveland police but failed to capture the “Mad Butcher” who decapitated at least a dozen victims, American Detective offers an indelible portrait of the famous sleuths and investigators who played a major role in cracking some of the most notorious criminal cases in U.S. history. Along the way Reppetto takes us deep inside the detective bureaus that were once the nerve centers behind crime-fighting on the streets of America’s great cities, including the FBI itself, under the direction of America’s “top cop,” J. Edgar Hoover. According to Reppetto, detectives were once able watchdogs until their role in policing became diluted by patrol strategies ranging from “stop and frisk” to community policing. Reppetto argues against these current policing systems and calls for a return to the primacy of the detective in criminal investigations.

A virtual cornucopia of whodunits from the true masters of the craft, including Edgar Alan Poe, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Craig Rice, Ellery Queen, and Raymond Chandler, this anthology contains some genuine rarities.

This book highlights detection's malleability by analyzing the works of particular groups of authors from specific time periods written in response to other texts. It traces the roles that gender, race and empire have played in American detective fiction from Edgar Allan Poe's works through the myriad variations upon them published before 1920 to hard-boiled fiction (the origins of which derive in part from turn-of-the-20th-century notions about gender, race and nationality), and it concludes with a discussion of contemporary mystery series with inner-city settings that address black male and female heroism.

From the Roaring Twenties to the 1970s detectives reigned supreme in police departments across the country. In this tightly woven slice of true crime reportage, Thomas A. Reppetto offers a behind-the-scenes look into some of the most notable investigations to occur during the golden age of the detective in American criminal justice. From William Burns, who during his heyday was known as America’s Sherlock Holmes, to Thad Brown, who probed the notorious Black Dahlia murder in Los Angeles, to Elliott Ness, who cleaned up the Cleveland police but failed to capture the “Mad Butcher” who decapitated at least a dozen victims, American Detective offers an indelible portrait of the famous sleuths and investigators who played a major role in cracking some of the most notorious criminal cases in U.S. history. Along the way Reppetto takes us deep inside the detective bureaus that were once the nerve centers behind crime-fighting on the streets of America’s great cities, including the FBI itself, under the direction of America’s “top cop,” J. Edgar Hoover. According to Reppetto, detectives were once able watchdogs until their role in policing became diluted by patrol strategies ranging from “stop and frisk” to community policing. Reppetto argues against these current policing systems and calls for a return to the primacy of the detective in criminal investigations. Purchase the audio edition.

Explores U.S. detective fiction's deep engagement with the shifting dynamics of race and labor in America

Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue" launched the detective story in 1841. The genre began as a highbrow form of entertainment, a puzzle to be solved by a rational sifting of clues. In Britain, the stories became decidedly upper crust: the crime often committed in a world of manor homes and formal gardens, the blood on the Persian carpet usually blue. But from the beginning, American writers worked important changes on Poe's basic formula, especially in use of language and locale. As early as 1917, Susan Glaspell evinced a poignant understanding of motive in a murder in an isolated farmhouse. And with World War I, the Roaring '20s, the rise of organized crime and corrupt police with Prohibition, and the Great Depression, American detective fiction branched out in all directions, led by writers such as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, who brought crime out of the drawing room and into the "mean streets" where it actually occurred. In The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories, Tony Hillerman and Rosemary Herbert bring together thirty-three tales that illuminate both the evolution of crime fiction in the United States and America's unique contribution to this highly popular genre. Tracing its progress from elegant "locked room" mysteries, to the hard-boiled realism of the '30s and '40s, to the great range of styles seen today, this superb collection includes the finest crime writers, including Erle Stanley Gardner, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, Rex Stout, Ellery Queen, Ed McBain, Sue Grafton, and Hillerman himself. There are also many delightful surprises: Bret Harte, for instance, offers a Sherlockian pastiche with a hero named Hemlock Jones, and William Faulkner blends local color, authentic dialogue, and dark, twisted pride in "An Error in Chemistry." We meet a wide range of sleuths, from armchair detective Nero Wolfe, to Richard Sale's journalist Daffy Dill, to Robert Leslie Bellem's wise-cracking Hollywood detective Dan Turner, to Linda Barnes's six-foot tall, red-haired, taxi-driving female P.I., Carlotta Carlyle. And we sample a wide variety of styles, from tales with a strongly regional flavor, to hard-edged pulp fiction, to stories with a feminist perspective. Perhaps most important, the book offers a brilliant summation of America's signal contribution to crime fiction, highlighting the myriad ways in which we have reshaped this genre. The editors show how Raymond Chandler used crime, not as a puzzle to be solved, but as a spotlight with which he could illuminate the human condition; how Ed McBain, in "A Small Homicide," reveals a keen knowledge of police work as well as of the human sorrow which so often motivates crime; and how Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer solved crime not through blood stains and footprints, but through psychological insight into the damaged lives of the victim's family. And throughout, the editors provide highly knowledgeable introductions to each piece, written from the perspective of fellow writers and reflecting a life-long interest--not to say love--of this quintessentially American genre. American crime fiction is as varied and as democratic as America itself. Hillerman and Herbert bring us a gold mine of glorious stories that can be read for sheer pleasure, but that also illuminate how the crime story evolved from the drawing room to the back alley, and how it came to explore every corner of our nation and every facet of our lives.

This critical study of American detective fiction examines the history and development of the detective genre through the lens of psychoanalysis. Applying the ideas of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the author identifies and categorizes popular works according to the fictional protagonist's hysteria, obsessive neurosis, perversion or psychosis. The first chapter identifies several instances of hysteria within the fiction of two of the genre's pioneers, Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle. Chapter Two traces the development of the hard-boiled detective's code of honor through the works of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Mickey Spillane, identifying the often-paradoxical nature of this code and its origins in obsessive neurosis. Chapter Three analyzes the anti-detective fiction of Philip K. Dick in terms of paranoid psychosis, and the final chapter returns to the question of hysteria, taking up the female hard-boiled detectives of author Marcia Muller.